Article December 20, 1930 Issue

It is a happy and auspicious sign of the tolerant and...

Harold Boardman, as Committee on Publication for Cambridgeshire, England,

Cambridge Chronicle and University Journal

It is a happy and auspicious sign of the tolerant and honest inquiry of the age in which we live that a preacher of the University Sermon should so candidly recognize the healing work of Christian Science as did the clergyman, in his interesting and stimulating sermon preached in St. Mary's Church on Sunday, May 25. As an interested reader, however, I trust you will give me the privilege of correcting one or two misrepresentations, which may prove helpful and acceptable to others, who, like myself, have read the sermon.

Christian Science is not a cult, and though its divine Principle had not been explicitly stated in scientific form until about the middle of the past century, its pure monotheism as the revelation of the one God, the one Mind, the one Spirit, will be found in the Old and the New Testament—as the record of the preaching and practice of the Jewish prophets, of Christ Jesus and his apostles. If the theology of Christian Science is fantastic and its founder eccentric, such epithets might be, and have been, equally and for the same reason predicated of the teaching and character of Paul and his great Master, Christ Jesus. The former was stigmatized by a Roman as "mad" and by Greeks as "this babbler;" and the greatest Christian that ever trod the globe was declared by his traducers to be "a gluttonous man, and a winebibber."

Such mistaken appraisals of the teaching and practice of reformers arose then, as they do to-day, through lack of spiritual discernment. The success and vitality of Christian Science arises not merely because it has, to use the preacher's metaphor, "kissed the soil," or faced the hard and stubborn facts of nature and experience, but because it is transforming these so-called facts in the way that Christianity, as Jesus taught it, transformed them, and that any Christian to-day can prove in proportion as he spiritually discerns and demonstrates the Principle or Mind of the Christ. Mrs. Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, in her book "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 138) thus refers unequivocally to the theology of Christ Jesus when she writes: "Our Master said to every follower: 'Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature!... Heal the sick! ... Love thy neighbor as thyself!' It was this theology of Jesus which healed the sick and the sinning. It is his theology in this book and the spiritual meaning of this theology, which heals the sick and causes the wicked to 'forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts.' It was our Master's theology which the impious sought to destroy."

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